So is there a better way? Surely we could manage a listing of postcodes to avoid or give special treatment to, according to the business you are in. Perhaps Australia Post have something?

Well, kinda. Mail deliveries to bushfire areas does list areas having trouble with mail. There are descriptions of the ways Australia Post will be helping manage mail in those areas. What about a postcode list for direct marketers?

Community to the rescue! Shortly after all this I discovered an eBay Australia forum that was keeping track of the postcodes. Of course! eBay sellers and buyers who have one or other party of a transaction in these areas are likely to have slow communication for a while.

So that is where we are up to. I urge all of you who have databases with postcodes listed take the time to flag the affected codes, at least for a week or two, and make this flag known to your business people. At least we can avoid hassling customers for non-contact or selling them stuff they don’t need in this terrible time.

As of this writing, that eBay list shows the following areas in trouble:

[Note I wrote this draft at 2:30am from bed on my iPhone, I had intended to edit but I think it is more interesting as is]

How will you feel when, next we meet, I ask how you enjoyed the last movie you saw, referring to it by name? About your partner? Your kids? Pets?

Does that depend on our relationship? If we aren’t close, but I have good ‘people skills’ (read an exellent memory for personal details) is it creepy or does it engender perhaps a closer bond than before?

Now if my recall is augmented by notes in my address book swotted before we meet, is that different?

What about a politician’s handlers prompting these tidbits?

What if these details writhe ghostly about your person when I see, or even hear you? Only to me of course, apparitions conjoured inside my glasses by my digital djinn. Divining your recent personal history by re-tracing your digital footprints upon need. My very own internet 6th sense, a social prosthesis if you will.

This is the world being summoned right now by the technomancers, the wunderkind, the hackers of our futures.

There are many philosophical questions to be answered, let alone new social customs to be discovered. Or perhaps merely unearthed? Restored from a time not so long ago when social graces really did make the world go around.